Sharjah 24: “Time, for me, is a fabric that can be warped and stretched but I flatten it on a second plane to depict the journey of a place from the time day ends to when night begins,” said celebrated American photographer and artist Stephen Wilkes while discussing his iconic Night and Day project at the sixth Xposure International Photography Festival at Expo Centre Sharjah.
In a conversation with Whitney Johnson, Vice President of Visuals & Immersive Experiences at National Geographic, Wilkes spoke at length of his unique storytelling technique, which he calls Masterplay. “It aims to explore new ways of seeing. Everything I do is about seeing because I am addicted to looking at things,” he said, while describing how he has been parking himself atop purpose-built scaffoldings, often 40 feet high, in locations around the world including the US, Greenland, Iceland, and even in Africa’s Serengeti National Park.
“We are living through the most dynamic period of visual storytelling, and I want people to see what I see, to feel what I feel, and that is possible thanks to technology,” said Wilkes.
“Some of my final images have taken months to complete and I eventually use only around 50 of the 1,600 or more images I click during a stretch of 36 hours of non-stop filming,” he said. “I use technology as a vehicle to tell the story. A lot happens in 36 hours -- it changes your perception about that place.”
Wilkes first began work on Day to Night by capturing epic cityscapes and landscapes in New York. “The work was designed to capture fleeting moments of humanity over the course of a full day. People in New York never look up. So essentially, I am left to all by myself, capturing the ebb and flow of the city but I wanted to do it in a way that would be a celebration of New York,” he said.
A grant from the National Geographic Society later enabled him to extend the project to include America’s National Parks in celebration of their centennial anniversary and to mark the Year of the Bird in 2018, he travelled to Lake Bogoria in Kenya to document the bird migration.
In 2019, he travelled to Greenland to capture what, he said, would turn out to be his first Day to Night photo of a place with virtually 24 hours of daylight. It was an experience of a lifetime, added Wilkes, when he saw humpback whales swim along Greenland’s rapidly melting icesheet.
A behind-the-scenes clips of his expedition to Iceland, filming the Fagradalsfjall volcano just on the verge of billowing plumes of fire and smoke, held the Xposure audience captive. Wilkes also spoke about his photos that have documented recent moments in US history to show how his technique expands a viewer’s understanding of a particular moment in time.
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